What I Learned at Clubhouse
anu.substack.com
anu.substack.com
Clubhouse is in a rare position - they exploded, were definitely in hyper growth, and then disintegrated. Clubhouse seemed like it hit an effect where the network stopped being a positive. When they were small and used by elite people, they were super popular and exclusive. When everyone got in there it was basically clubs for... I don't even know how to name the people, but not really that valuable. Basically like a nightclub - cool if it's exclusive and lame if everyone can go in. I'd much rather read an insider's take on this unique perspective.
But I never found any groups I could participate in. There were vast deserts of interests - either because search was bad, or people simply weren't discussing those topics. I'd try to create my own rooms, but no one would ever join.
And now here we are.
Knowledge is memetic. The good shit spreads.
Then for the randoms talking to randoms type groups, voice chat is a big increase in commitment over Reddit/HN/whatever. You could argue that encourages better contributions, but it also discourages frequent contributions, which in turn helped the "fizzling out" effect
I got the impression that the VCs using Clubhouse were just diverting some of their Twitter time.
Its success was essentially luck, with VCs attempting to extrapolate its success to other entrepreneurial endeavors annoyingly.
"hey zoom cool! We can do online meetings...and it works."
But then quickly it became a drag.
I recall being in a Clubhouse session with Paris Hilton and another with Anthony Scaramucci and thought "wow, there are some interesting people on this platform" Yet, being on a call regularly would likely reduce this initial novelty factor real quick.
Funny, that would give me the exact opposite response.
One of the points from the article is the following:
> Lesson #4 — Beware of complexity creep
> Anticipate this, then build in early checkpoints. Define success and failure before a launch. Build a solid process and track the right metrics to help make objective, decisive decisions — and don’t forget to create a framework to sunset things!
And since the author is writing the blogpost from the perspective of "Here is how you can build something as successful as Clubhouse" instead of "Here is how you can avoid what we failed to avoid", I'm guessing whatever their definition of success/failure is, they seem to have hit it.
Worth keeping in mind if you actually want to build something that turned out like Clubhouse at all, if you're reading this article.
Nothing new was brought to the table that could not be copied. This is why the Clubhouse had nothing interesting inside it and my mind remains unchanged on this since [0].
Clubhouse should have tried to sell itself to Twitter as soon as possible, though I'm not sure it could have worked out regardless. It's just too easy to copy the idea, and they're unlucky because of that.
If something is lead by the main person/people, then it won’t be a natural sort of discussion right?
I don’t know how to get to Twitter Spaces, but did use Clubhouse a bit.
That form may be perfect for the subject - the genius of Twitter Spaces is its flexibility: it can be indistinguishable from a podcast (with 1 person speaking), or a town hall where anyone/everyone can get to speak, and anything in between. I've been in some amazingly great/funny/informative Spaces - and it hinged on the quality of moderation.
FWIW, "a podcast with a Q&A" is valuable: it can draw out amazing insights from listeners in realtime - unlike regular podcasts that get discussed on Twitter after the fact, and without canonical answers.
One VC: Andreessen Horowitz. Who are now knee-deep in the crypto rug-pull scam.
For a while, it was a place where I could interact with an invite-only subset of humans with real names on the internet. I really loved that aspect of it. As it opened up, I saw people using fewer real names, fewer links to real name social media accounts, just felt less exclusive and more just like Twitter. At that point, I think Twitter Spaces started taking off.
The question I ask is how to build an online space that is exclusive, without the draw to make it for the masses?
The sheer number of introductions I had to sit and listen to any time I joined one…it was absolutely baffling. We’re talking sometimes 15 minutes of just sitting there as every person introduced themselves, every project they are working on, their experience, their favorite shows, their workout routine, etc.
The one time I actually found a conversation about gear talk (film/video) it was just a couple of folks who were new to the industry all trying to power network with each other. It was weird. Podcast ones were just people treating it like their podcast.
When did you join?
Google+ kind of accomplished this with Circles; a way to create invite-only communities within the larger platform. A few of the social media sites have bolted on something similar, but none have really designed around it like Google+ did.
I'm curious about the brand that says, "Nope, we're an online platform just for 10,000 people" or "who make this much money" or "who are in these communities."
I wonder what examples already exist, if any, that tie the whole brand to a specific online exclusivity.
Otherwise I think you just end up with niche forums like this one or discord channels and whatnot.
That s why no one can do it: if you want to speak to Warren Buffet you ll be more successful having something that interests him to say, and no amount of trying to cheat reality can hide for long that asymetry: there was nothing in it for the VIP but milking you.
I'm not saying I should necessarily be in the room lol. Just that maybe there is a way to limit it where there is a level of assumed parity among participants. For example, maybe Warren Buffett would like to talk with the guy behind moneyball from The Oakland A's about the influence of statistics on sports. I think yes it could dilute too much, I just don't think it necessarily has to.
My comment then - "I am a strong sell on ClubHouse at a $2b valuation. Just like Medium and Quora, once the masses are allowed on, the noise will get too high and the signal will get lost." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144326).
Source: I was an early Clubhouse employee and left a few months ago.
I'd appreciate it if people with more experience than me weighed in on if the acquisition could have been aborted, if it could technically have been aborted but probably would have gone through, or if it would have gone through cause a contract is a contract.
Now the last private valuation will probably be impossible to hit.
Or rather, I could see how a VC might want to ensure that the offer is a sufficent ROI, either by preapproving a minimum or requiring signoff. But why wouldn't a16z want to take their huge returns? Did their partners see a better ROI anytime soon?
I assumed they went in at an earlier round at a eight or nine figure valuation, so I was thinking it was a 10-100x on their money in a year or so.
Just at an FYI to the author, this is a bad idea. Once you have left a startup, your opinions are going to be valued much less by everybody still there because, well, you quit. Your incentives are now not aligned fully, you aren’t part of the mission anymore, and this was because you decided you didn’t want to be.
And from your perspective, you quit. Don’t waste your time on them anymore, fully focus on your next project.
The startup has actual important things to do and the former employee has new projects to start. When a founder leaves it isn’t even that big a deal, nobody cares about a former employee.
I guess the company should just do that with every former employee? I mean, why not.
This is the behavior of a person and company playing startup and not actually trying to build a strong company.
Like when Carl Pei left OnePlus, we all knew it would go to shit once Oppo took over but they kept up the pretense for a while to protect the brand before they started undermining it.
For the 'advisor' there's probably a financial arrangement to this to keep them quiet and from shoveling up dirt in the media. It's hard to just give someone money like that so again a fake role comes in handy.
Overall though good riddance because that entire idea is antithetical to what digital tech can do. I remember that Elon talk where people 'did not fit in a room', and they broadcasted it to other instances. Literally like an overflowing conference room in a virtual space that has no need for these limitations if you weren't trying to desperately sell access.
I think they have clubhouse for android now, but without it essentially 1/2 the population was at best left out, but at worse (and very realistically) made to feel they weren't a wealthy enough consumer for the product. He essentially told 1/2 of the globe that they weren't a good enough customer, most of them just shrugged, said ok, and then never looked back at the product.
Billions on one topic? I agree. Millions on one topic? Sure that is possible. Just look at talk radio ,which is still alive. Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do,
Clubhouse's format was about synchronous audio - you have to be there at the moment something is said to hear it. They can add a recording feature to it, but then it's just a poor man's podcast platform.
> Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do
Citation needed? Actual radio listenership has plunged through the floor. Podcasts certainly command that kind of audience size regularly - but again, async, which is a key distinction from the Clubhouse format.
More generally media has evolved from synchronous to asynchronous, and everywhere where they've competed the market has chosen in favor of async media. Broadcast TV is (mostly) dead in favor of on-demand streaming, talk radio is (mostly) dead in favor of podcasts.
The merits of async are huge in terms of audience size - there's a reason the format itself has pivoted towards podcasts. It feels like Clubhouse's synchronicity is both its greatest asset (i.e., novelty, candidness, spontaneity) and worst liability (i.e., intrinsic limit to audience availability) - and honestly it seems pretty obvious at this point what the net viability of the idea was, given that constraint.
Of course, each social app goes through various inflection points and arguably celebrities is towards the peak end of it. Celebrities usually catch on once it's already going mainstream or has a mainstream appeal. For example, Twitter had already created strong base of engaged users before celebrities caught on.
What I don't get about articles like this, is that the growth is just taken for granted as if it's easily replicated. It's all about hard-fought learnings about product/ops/GTM, and none of that is relevant if you don't come up with an initially compelling product. How can you nurture growth if there is no growth in the first place? Maybe I'm a dumbass who just doesn't "get it," but it seems to me like a premature victory lap to celebrate these learnings before proving that they are fundamental to repeatable success.
When we began, Clubhouse was the new "hotness," and I was getting a great deal of pressure to mimic it.
I resisted, as it did not actually work with the model we had established for the app. I also had a rather pessimistic outlook on its chances. It did not make me popular.
Glad I did.
This article would have been way more valuable if distilled into a poignant lesson or insight about why Clubhouse failed.
community building requires curation tools
Clubhouse added many features to encourage growth & adoption, but not one easy UX for curation
When I would visit the apps there was no quick and easy way to “mute” the algorithm where content was being surfaced that I didn’t want
Consequently my notifications were useless & I turned them off
So the magic of “this real person I want to hear from is in a room right now!” disappeared
It seems an obvious lesson to learn given the other comments here?
OP, very curious to hear your take on this.
And when the people who want to monetize the community take over, curation tools are deliberately hobbled, and the community changes accordingly - always, IMO, for the worse.
The community is close-knit and we've had some success at getting the "sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name" vibe going for our power users.
Most of our content & culture is averse to casual chit-chat and more focused on peer to peer learning about something that's mutually of interest, or enjoying some local poetry & music. We've been fairly editorial from the start with a focus on meaningful conversations which will always be a core proposition.
We raised about $300K in seed in September and we have been humming along since, with monetization coming next month.
I'm obviously biased but I think our format is simpler - it's 20 minutes, you set the context, say your piece and talk to upto 5 others and unlimited listeners who can chime in from the live chat. If you want, you can extend for another 5 minutes to wrap up. All the conversations and chat transcripts are publicly available and recorded, so you don't really miss out if you join late or can't make it.
The Clubhouse story is great because it's like a lens into the future for similar apps in terms of the challenges that one can expect - curation, spam, lewd content, crypto nonsense, harassment, etc.
What’s the tech stack?
And how are you planning to monetise this? Sponsored chats or membership fees?
Btw, website layout is screwed on smaller screens… I’m on an iPad 10” screen.
The mobile apps are Flutter and the rest is a mix of Ruby, Go, node.js, postgres, redis and various AWS offerings.
> Monetization
Probably membership fees
> Website
Thanks I'll check it out
I joined in August 2020 and it was already declining at. that point; really hit the inflection point into the ground in late Q3/early Q4 2020.
I find the OP's "25 Lessons Learned" is kind of a smokescreen that covers all earthly eventualities other than meteors and solar flares, and I can't see which of the 25 are the primary excuse for not deploying Android and scaling up the platform engineering in 5/2021 when they urgently needed to. Should have just sold out to Twitter unless they had a rock-solid plan to execute that in 2021. Consider that $4b would have been 13% of TWTR's valuation today. (How much of Twitter's bid would have been cash?)
See their trail of statements [1]: [1/2021 said “soon, but no definite timeline”. Instead, most of [Clubhouse's] statements about Android have been vague mentions of the importance of supporting the Android user base and making its app more accessible to a wider audience.... co-founder Davison explained the company’s approach to scaling to a larger market — like one where Android users participate — as an effort that requires a slower pace, when it comes to opening up access to more users. He noted that when Clubhouse grows, the discovery experience inside the app can be negatively impacted as a result. Users today are seeing more foreign language groups in their feeds, for instance, and are having a harder time finding friends and some of the best content, he said. [blaming the lack of selectivity on engineering and UX isn't credible]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/22/clubhouse-says-its-android...
Still, overall great lessons. In the end, it seems like Clubhouse is more of a feature that can be added to an existing product rather than a full product by itself. That doesn't necessarily make it a failure but much harder to turn into a long-term company. Reminds me a bit of Dropbox in that sense.
“…an early employee and Head of Community”